Figure-Device Artworks of Jasper Johns: Abstraction and Figuration of the Haunting Body by Tiffany Barnes
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Figure-Device Artworks of Jasper Johns: Abstraction and Figuration of the Haunting Body By Tiffany Barnes Auburn University; Montgomery, Alabama Vol 3, Yr 2008 A survey review of Jasper Johns typically only looks at the flag and target work of his early years. Following these more commonly known pieces, the artist included new visual themes to his repertoire, one of which was the "device."(1) This mechanically produced agent first appeared in 1959, in his Device Circle (fig. 1). In this painting, as is typical of his drawings and paintings in which he uses the device, the mechanical arm--usually a wood strip of some sort--is used to scrape the paint in an arc shape--in this case curving into a complete circle with the arm still attached to the canvas. The development of the device theme in Johns’ work progressed to incorporate other themes, such as the abundant use of text(2), but eventually including the new theme of the body imprint, alluding to "an overarching allegory of art as of and from the body."(3) This mixing of the device action and body imprint is evident in works such as Periscope (Hart Crane) from 1963, in which Johns uses the imprint of his arm over the device- arm’s scrape, giving the impression that the artist’s arm functioned as the device-arm. Similar figural function with scrapes and imprints is found in Diver from 1962-3, a post-production study of a portion of a much larger work from the previous year by the same name, in which he uses many themes seen throughout his early years. Johns’ work combines imagery of abstraction and figuration, taking each to an avant-garde level and dismissing previous conventions about both. Jeffery Weiss, curator and head of the department of modern and contemporary art for the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., explains, "he reinvent[ed] figuration as a manifestation of mechanical process alone, reimagin[ed] a place for the body in pictoral art."(4) Johns also took the idea of the figure as a device to its outer limit with his Study for "Skin" series (1962; collection of the artist), the images of which were intended as pre-production work for an unrealized sculpture. In the "Skin" series, he used his own face and hands in a stamp-like fashion to record on a flat plane the round of his face. This method was also used in later works, like Skin with O’Hara Poem of 1963/5, and in some of which he imprinted other portions of his body as well. Largely through imprints, and in the works Diver (1962-3), Periscope (Hart Crane) (1963), and Skin with O’Hara Poem (1963/5), Johns presents the artist’s body as another artistic device, not much different from the brushes and charcoal he also used, and, in the process, brings the figure into a realm of fragmented abstraction. Jasper Johns first entered the art scene in 1957 with Green Target (1955; Museum of Modern Art, NY), and during the following year, the New York gallery owner Leo Castelli granted him with a solo show, bestowing him with instant success.(5) Johns had long aspired to be an artist, and in 1954 he made the commitment that changed his life; he said: Before, whenever anybody asked me what I did, I said I was going to become an artist. Finally I decided that I could be going to become an artist forever, all my life. I decided to stop becoming an artist and to be an artist.(6) His artistic devotion landed him in an art scene that was well established in the Abstract Expressionism movement, but despite his process-evident works and dream influences, he did not have the violent application of emotional paint and the truly abstract nature of these predecessors. Rather, his work brought the object back to the canvas and attempted to leave the personality out of it, presenting the world instead.(7) Due to his use of collage, encaustic painting, and sculpture casts on his work, Johns’ early style came to be known as Assemblage Art, but another, commonly used term, that also seems to cover his later works as well, is "Neo-Dadaism."(8) He and Robert Rauschenburg--contemporary, companion, and artistic influence--were labeled this together due to their shared artistic ideas: These attitudes included a belief that art sprang from life experiences, but that the painter was not obliged to be "self-expressive" in the manner then popular; a belief that the commonplace should be incorporated into art; a belief that looking at art, you should see whatever you ordinarily saw; and a belief that the hard distinction between representation and abstraction overlooked an ambiguous middle area of great interest to them both.(9) It is this collision of abstraction and figuration, along with the created ambiguity, typical of his works of the 50’s and 60’s, which is evident in his figure-device works. Before moving on to examine these works, it is important to note the significant role of the viewer to Johns’ art. He shared Dada artist Marcel Duchamp’s idea that "It is the spectator who makes the pictures," meaning that the painting, as an intercessor between the artist and viewer, gains meaning from what the artist does with it and how the viewer perceives it.(10) In a 1964 interview, Johns, himself, said: "What it is--subject matter, then--is simply determined by what you’re willing to say it is. What it means is simply a question of what you’re willing to let it do." He goes further to say that after a painting is revealed by the artist, the viewer plays a huge role, and "the work is no longer [the artist’s] ’intention,’ but the thing being seen and someone responding to it."(11) The viewer’s interpretation plays just as large a role in a work’s meaning as the artist’s creation and intention of it-- characteristic of the ambiguity espoused in his work and evident in his talks about them. In Johns’ Diver (fig. 2) of 1962-3, the division of the two panels bisects the image vertically in the middle of the piece, and in the process, creates a line of approximate symmetry. In the top center of the image a pair of footprints points upward, one on each panel, on a strip down the center, which is lighter than the surrounding background area. In the bottom middle of the work a set of downward facing handprints is located at the end of two sets of sweeping marks, appearing as if it were the hands themselves that made these scrapes. One set of the marks arcs outward, curving up and out, to about one third the way up the panels, and ending in an upward pointed arrow tip; the other set of marks extends upward from the hands and out at about a 20? angle. A little over half way up the canvas, this second set of scrapes ends in another pair of handprints, these facing upward, with a downward arrow extending from each hand. The ’background’ area of the image is filled with scribbles and smudges, most of it appearing to have been made with the broad side of a charcoal stick. The media used gives this piece a gray and black monochromatic scheme on a brown plane. In the very left-bottom corner, there is the stenciled word "DIVER" in charcoaled letters over the rest of the image. In looking at Diver, semiotic meaning can be derived by examining the purpose of the symbols and signs in the painting. The most obvious interpretation of the painting comes from the title, which is, as Johns himself has said, "the idea of the swan dive."(12) From the painting, this impression is evident--the straightness of the body in the middle portion, the movement and sweeping of the arms in the handprints and scrapes. Richard Francis observes, "The implication of the figure (absent but traces out) in the Diver pieces (1963), for example, is that he had dived into the painting, broken its surface, shattered its flatness."(13) An unobservant reading might suggest that the image depicts a diver having just left the diving board, and that the board exists within the middle portion of the piece, but an internal ambiguity lends problems to this idea. Looking at the footprints, a very noticeable aspect is that they are facing upward, not in the position to be jumping off a diving board and into the rest of the image. It is this ambiguity that is created by the existence of only a figural reference, the absence of a clear depiction of the figure. I see the upward direction of the footprints as a blatant indication that the figure, or this idea of a figure, is in fact, not on a diving board. Instead, the diver has already left the board and is plummeting, unhindered, into the water, his hands already entering the water; hence, they are the most clear form, and the dark, perilous water parts as his body enters the depths. (14) The image becomes very clear, and this reading is harmonious with the artist’s original dedication. Diver was dedicated to Hart Crane, an American poet--with whose writings Johns seems to identify, because of the repetitive appearances in his work, including this piece, Periscope, and a few others--who in 1932, committed suicide by jumping from a ship and into the ocean. (15) So, with this dedication in mind, I believe the image of a diver, having already left his platform and is clearly plummeting into the water, to be most evident.